Mapping the Economy’s ‘Man-cession’
Analysts didn’t have to scratch very far beneath the surface of the government’s July 2 report on the employment situation to find troubling news.
While the disappearing workforce and “lackluster” private sector job growth got most of the ink and bandwidth, what caught my attention was the renewed spike in the unemployment gender gap.
As recently as 2005, as seen here, the average unemployment rate for 20-and-over men was a bit lower than the rate for women (4.4% vs. 4.6%). During the next two years, those rates were virtually identical.
As seen here, after small differences during the first half of 2008, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for men first exceeded that of women by over a half-point in July of that year. It just so happens that this was the first month of the recession as normal people define it and the first full month of what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy since its inception.
By August 2009, the unemployment gender gap had grown to 2.5 points. It basically stayed there for the next three months, and then began to fall slowly. But in June, it widened again to 2.1 points (9.9% for over-20 males vs. 7.8% for over-20 females) from May’s 1.7 points (9.8% vs. 8.1%). Given what happened when the rates first significantly diverged two years ago, the resurgence of the gender gap may foreshadow the double-dip recession so many observers have begun to fear, even on the left.
While the degree of the male-female unemployment divergence is without precedent, it builds on a 30-year marketplace trend.
From 1948 to 1981, with only rare and tiny exceptions, the unemployment rate for women exceeded that of men, even during economic contractions. That changed during the recession of the early-1980s. In 1982 and 1983, average 20-and-over male unemployment bumped up against 9%, while female unemployment rose to just above 8%. Male-female differentials of similar size reappeared during the next two downturns in 1991-1993 and 2001-2003 even though they were far less severe. But in each case, the rates returned to rough equality when the economy improved.
At its worst, the “man-cession,” the informal term for the male-female unemployment differential, has often been 2-3 times as big during Obama’s term as any gap previously seen. It seems to be heading in that direction again.
Why did this happen?
In this recession, many of the jobs which were lost and in many cases disappeared forever were in male-dominated sectors like the automotive industry and construction; free but unfair trade and the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac-driven housing bubble have been key contributors to their respective declines. Meanwhile, certain fields which have traditionally had a higher percentage of women, including education and health care, continued to experience job growth or at least didn’t contract.
POR is right
“new normal”
structural unemployment of 8 to 10%
The assault on new, small and medium size business is the core of the matter.
3 minimum wage hikes have been brutal on black male teen unemployment.
it’s hard to take over the world one small business at a time. Corporations are so much easier – one big lump. so, drive small businesses (many women and minority owned) out of business.
You know what I’d like to see in an article entitled “Mapping the Economy’s ‘Man-cession’?”
A map.
I am tired of how the Marxist propaganda mantra “jobs lost or disappeared forever” has now seemed to have been accepted in all areas of the media including conservative blogs, including the article above. The real truth is that the jobs are lost as long as America is ruled by the current crop of Marxist/Democrats. If and when the people of America come to their senses and repeal all of the anti- business, anti-liberty laws and regulations, especially the environmental Nazi laws and reduce the Democratic Party to a small lunatic fringe group (as opposed to what they are now – a large minority lunatic group in power) then all of these supposedly “lost forever jobs” and a vast number of new ones will either reappear or be created. Stop buying into the notion the America will not regain her greatness and prosperity, this is what the Marxists would have everyone believe so as to further their tightening grip on absolute power.
Stafford:
Click on the two “as seen heres” in the column.
You may be looking for state-by-state stats, which, although they might make for a good follow-up column, are a bit harder to get, and couldn’t be addressed in the space available.
Mr. Blumer: I think what Stafford means is an actual “map”. I’ll admit, I thought I’d find one too, but I’m a big map nerd and am always looking for some good spatial representation of data. Regardless, map or no map, Obama and his “policies” are still disastrous for this great country.
Re-work all trade deals and REINDUSTRIALIZE AMERICA. Declare a MORATORIUM ON ALL IMMIGRATION. We have been wiping out traditional male jobs for at least two decades now. That has been done on purpose to create instability and havoc within our society. The male has been the target of the Marxist cultural revolution and his role has been deliberately marginalized. Weaker men means a weaker America. There is not a country since the beginning of the world that has achieved greatness without the influence of men. And the left in America knows it. While they are weakening American males, their “dream” countries suppress women. Hasn’t anyone figured out that all social policies pushed by the left in the last four decades have been pushing men towards extinction? The men should realize it and fight back hard. But they have been too “whipped” to know where to begin. Everywhere you look, schools, courts, jobs, media, entertainment, the traditional male has been disparaged and destroyed. Why? Because imminent collapse awaits. The Marxists have been waiting for this moment for years.
It hasn’t been trade deals that have resulted in the loss of manufacturing jobs. It has been automation. America manufactures as much, if not more than it ever did. It just does it with a lot fewer workers.
Regardless, where did you get the notion that to be a man, you have to build things with your hands?
Hi Mark,
I hate to disagree with you, but I’m an automation engineer that worked to automate many factories. The automation didn’t run off factory workers. Most of the factories I worked to automate retrained displaced workers and trained them to maintain the automation system. I will give you the fact that an automated factory produced products faster.
The real culprit was the Americans with Disabilities Act. This law became a full employment program for litigious, jackass lawyers. They eventually ran much of the manufacturing base out of the US. It simply became easier to move the factory overseas than deal with the continuous legal assault.
Junius, even in great economies certain jobs disappear forever. About 15% of people worked in agriculture 60 years ago; now it’s 1% or 2%. Those jobs have disappeared forever, which is not a bad thing, because they’ve been more than replaced by others.
Similarly, even if auto sales totally recover to where they were, many of the jobs lost aren’t ever coming back, especially if you want to get geographically specific.
So while I understand your frustration, which I share, with the regime’s setting expectations that jobs on the whole aren’t coming back, that doesn’t change the fact that people who are out of work all too often limit their job search to finding new employment doing what they used to do. All too often, it’s just impossible. It’s not fun, and my sympathies are with them, but when conditions dictate it, they have to figure out a way to move on to something else.
The man-cession is an indication of the coming decline in our standard of living and masks economic reality. Perhaps we should stop looking at the unemployment rate. Visualize a “not creating private wealth rate” in the country.
Just guessing, the “official” unemployment rate is about 10%. Those given up looking for work may be 5%. How many Americans are receiving some type of government welfare entitlement choosing not to be economically productive, maybe 10%.
Governments do not create wealth or prosperity, it redistributes wealth via taxes (confiscation of private wealth) usually to the people in charge of the distribution and their friends. People who work for governments, Federal, State and local do not create wealth so add 15% for them.
So we have a “not creating priivate wealth rate” of about 40%. The number of people not working to create wealth today dwarfs the Great Depression.
It does indicate the power and productivity of our capitalist free enterprise system that 60% of the population can support the other 40%.
We are all feminists believing all people are created equal so it is a people-cession and a lot of people are suffering.
“The male has been the target of the Marxist cultural revolution and his role has been deliberately marginalized. Weaker men means a weaker America. There is not a country since the beginning of the world that has achieved greatness without the influence of men. And the left in America knows it.”
scythe, your analysis is right on the money. The Frankfurt School of Social Research, the fountainhead of today’s political correctness movement, knew that to bring down western civilization, it had to weaken its sources of strength – the family, church, and Judeo-Chrisitian values. Thus, they posited a “long march” through these institutions via a relentless propganda campaign to discredit, among other things, the traditional notion of manhood. The vehicles for doing so were varied, including feminism and what they called critical theory – a relentless criticism of anything connected with the foundations of western society and civilization. Today, many years after their effort began, they have achieved success on an unimagined scale. American culture in the year 2010 is thoroughly feminized. Places where men can go to be men, or teach boys to be men, are ever-more-rare, thanks to lawsuits and relentless pressure by the feminazis. Male-oriented occupations? Good luck. They are even more scarce. We shipped them all to China. Know who the biggest provider of child care in America is? Answer: the U.S. Army, that’s who. The military used to be about making men, now vast tracts of it are nothing more than social services programs for single mothers. I could go on in this vein, but I think we all know the score.
RE: your ideas on reindustrializing America and declaring a moratorium on immigration… couldn’t agree more.
My late father, who fought in WWII, wouldn’t recognize what we’ve let ourselves become, or the man-child we “elected” president.
The Latin word patria means “family”. Pater is “father”. The father is the initiator – the ultimate source. Ultimately a Family is a Fatherhood.It is the man who sets the thing in motion and those facts will never change.
The Latin word “patria” means “homeland, native country, fatherland.” It derives from the stem of the noun “pater” (stem is patr-), which means “father.”
But the family is actually “familia,” better translated “household,” i.e., including non-blood-relatives, like slaves.
I can find no entry in the Oxford Latin Dictionary under “patria” meaning “family.”
Another factor is surely the havoc that has been caused by larger corporations jettisoning their older middle-management people with the most seniority. These are mostly male because many women pause in their careers to bear and raise children. I would also note that the phony unemployment rate numbers released by self-serving government agencies are rigged so that someone whose unemployment benefits have run out is no longer considered unemployed even if he or she is at home being supported by their spouse. If the UI rate was calculated as a percentage of able-bodied adults who arent working or going to school this phony 9.6 number would at least be doubled. As long as people continue to vote for Democrats we will have this catastrophe. There are no moderate Democrats. They are all a bunch of anti-business, anti-wealth, totalitarian, freedom-hating, left-wing goons, no matter how ‘moderate’ they lie and say they are when they’re running for reelection. If you vote for ANY Democrat for ANY office YOU are part of the problem.
and far more blacks as percentage of population are out of work. but obumbler doesn’t care about them (useful idiots) either. the marxist want’s control, control, he must have control . .. .
The Tea Party has a national recovery plan (can be seen at http://www.martea.net/Healingtheeconomy.aspx).
Get things going again and there will be all kinds of work for both genders.
The Fan/Fred fiasco really screwed up the whole real estate market and construction market. My husband was a small time builder, framer and finish carpenter and now he’s doing remodels and repairs which is a far cry from building a few homes each year and making decent money.
I think the real estate market and construction/building will come back but it’s going to be a long road. People will always need something built or want a new home but it’s not going to be a cake-walk to get one like it was. When my husband and I bought our first home we had to come up with a good chunk of change and we had to prove viable employment (ah the good ol’ days). It really got out of control and the big builders will building whole neighborhoods up out of farmland areas and selling cheap.
If my husband were ten years older we would have had to go bankrupt, as it is, we are barely getting by month to month (especially with recent medical bills). I can’t imagine how hard this has been on others who are not as fortunate us to have scraped by. I pray for everyone and hope against all hope that we can survive the crap the Dems have done to destroy our economy both in the Bush admin and now in this one.
Ugh
Hey, Delia -
Those jobs are still there they have just morphed to other venues. That is th nature of it. Like someone said above, automation now replaces many had workers BUT they must upgrade skills to remain competitive. BTW, I am one of those and am a robot mechanic.
Have you husband look into replacing windows and doors. Some of the ideas of the green movement are good just not the way the drain bamaged at the top think it does. Making houses more efficient pays off now in real savings but the right things have to be done. Same goes for commercial buildings.
Unfortunately, whoever is calling the shots in the present administration does not understand how the economy works at a very basic level. They will probably continue to blunder around until the thing is a complete wreck. It would help if any of them had actually held a private sector job at some point, but that would just be too much to ask. They act like we can just print money and have Harvard hire everyone.
“Achieving that happy result will first require a return to genuine prosperity of the type the nation experienced during the mid- to late-1980s, mid- to late-1990s, and 2004-2007.”
Actually, those periods were economic bubbles. The late 90s was a debt driven dot com bubble. The last decade was a housing market debt driven bubble. The late 80s was also a debt driven economy where historical middle class consumption patterns required two income earners, namely a working wife. The pattern continues.
“The Obama administration’s current economic policies are on an often self-admitted path to high unemployment “for possibly years to come.” Many currently unemployed men, particularly the intractably low-skilled, won’t be getting back to work for quite awhile if the economy doesn’t significantly improve.”
True, but I’m sure the 12 million to 20 million low wage illegal aliens currently in the US sure doesn’t help the wage prospects of indigenous low wager labor either.
“Other helpful developments would include a “you’ve come a long way baby” acknowledgment that the noble war for female gender equity and equality in the workplace has largely been won; calling off “The War Against Boys” that is still being fought at too many schools; and shrinking the size of the public sector so that private individuals and firms can create new products, services, and jobs instead of living in fear of what their government will do to them next.”
May I suggest an ameliorative draft of females into the armed forces, an armed forces that currently suffers from “gender apartheid.” Surely if the current armed forces were sexually integrated on a one to one gender basis, there would be more civilian jobs available for males. Curiously, if we returned to a 60s style draft with educational deferments, I suspect the male enrollments in colleges and universities would skyrocket–as they did during the Vietnam era.
If there’s some way to get a felony on the record of all of thes out of work males there can be another huge block of disenfranchised males created and turned into useful idiots. After all, as long as the women are working it’s OK for the men to be hanging out on the street living off of government handouts and whatever they can hustle. See, it’s a good thing to throw more males out of work.
have a nice day
What are the laid-off guys going to do? Become nurses? Teachers? Those are female dominated fields, themselves under severe pressure from H1-Bs, just like engineering, software development, and other male dominated fields.
Meanwhile Advertising, Marketing, HR, Corporate Finance, and a host of other positions are a no-go area for Straight White guys. There is nowhere for these guys to go.
Also, about 75% of the jobs lost in the recession were male jobs. Which is usual for recessions. In the Great Depression, more women than men worked. Mostly as clerks, waitresses, retail etc.
Don:
“May I suggest an ameliorative draft of females into the armed forces, …”
This would certainly be fascist in the most literal, non-hyperbolic sense. Further you would have lawyers crying “sexist,” and for once they would be right.
“… an armed forces that currently suffers from “gender apartheid.””
Please don’t use the word “apartheid” in a context where one group isn’t passively exterminating another.
“Surely if the current armed forces were sexually integrated on a one to one gender basis, there would be more civilian jobs available for males.”
This is the fallacy that leads to the conclusion that WWII ended the Great Depression. You do not fix an economy by displacing large groups of people out of it. That would be like fixing a flat tire by driving it on sand instead of pavement.
“Curiously, if we returned to a 60s style draft with educational deferments, I suspect the male enrollments in colleges and universities would skyrocket–as they did during the Vietnam era.”
Modern college is largely irrelevant to the modern work place. Over half of your time in college is spent learning “social studies” of one form or another, and the other half is spent learning theory. Practical application is always better… my children will be told not to go to college, but to get an associates from a trade school. You would be out of the career work force 2 years, rather than 4, and you will gain a trade skill that is actually marketable.
I believe that the feminazi types have developed a synthetic sperm so that men won’t be needed for procreation. So, my question is,,,,why are men allowing this to happen? Let’s step up to the plate, boys,,,women like me need you. And, I am most certainly sick and tired of the emotionally inept gay women having a say so in American culture.
A female writer at the Weekly Standard did a great job of exposig how leftist anti-male feminists had hijacked the “stimulus” bill last year. They bitterly complained to the Obama regime leftists that were writing up the stimlus bill behind closed doors that they were concerned that white male construction workers would be the only people who would benefit from a splurge of government sponsored construction projects. And they were quickly assured that that definitely wouldn’t be the case. And indeed these feminist groups were given billions of dollars in the stimulus bill and job sectors that favor women – such as teaching and nursing – received a huge chunk of the stimulus funds. That’s one of the main reasons why the stimulus failed so hard. It just got completely ignored by the leftist media because they’re sexist misandrists.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/659dkrod.asp